The highest-end GPUs are always exciting, but that isn’t what a majority of users are using or need. In fact, while it is slowly changing the most used resolution on Steam hardware surveys is still 1080p with over 55% of users running that resolution. Almost all of the top video cards are all older mid-level cards as well. The truth is, for a lot of people they don’t upgrade constantly if what they are using works. That’s why cards like AMDs recently announced RX 9060 XT are the most important launches. For a lot of people, these are the cards that they will be looking at and considering with their next build or upgrade. They will be looking for a card that won’t struggle with anything at their 1080p or 1440p resolution and they will want performance with supersampling and ray tracing so that their next card lasts just as long as their last one. So let’s check out the ASRock RX 9060 XT Challenger OC 16GB that AMD sent over and see what the new GPU is all about!

Product Name: ASRock RX 9060 XT Challenger OC 16GB

Review Sample Provided by: AMD/ASRock

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

 

I would typically confirm the clock speeds using GPUz but at the time of our testing, it wasn’t picking up the clock speeds on our test card. But the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC does have an overclock with its game clock running at 2700 MHz, 170 MHz over the stock clock of the 9060 XT and its boost clock can run up to 3290 MHz, 160 MHz over the boost clock on a stock RX 9060 XT. Testing was done using the beta launch driver provided by AMD.

 

Packaging

The box for the ASRock RX 9060 XT Challenger OC has a black background and a large picture of the card across the front which is always great to see. The ASRock branding is up in the top left corner and in the bottom right corner, it has the AMD Radeon model information. Below the picture of the card is the Challenger branding along with a badge showing that this card is overclocked and another showing its 16GB VRAM capacity. Around on the back of the box, the black background continues and they have four more pictures of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC. This time the pictures are smaller and each highlights a different card feature like its dual fan design, the metal backplate, the fan design, and the RGB lighting as well. Beyond that the RX 9060 XT model name is up in the top left corner and they have a basic feature list from AMD as well as the basic system specifications.

When we get inside the box has a thick foam tray with a cutout shaped to the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC. The card comes wrapped in a static protective bag and sits in its foam bed that keeps it from moving around or being damaged.

 

Card Layout and Photos

The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, like a lot of cards these days, has a black plastic fan shroud but unlike the PNY card I recently took a look at, this card has a lot more aggressive styling molded into the shroud. There is a mix of different things going on including two knurled sections between the fans and above the fans and a few indents and groves. Below the left fan it also has the Challenger branding in silver with a few other greys and it is hard to see but above the right fan has a glossy finish as well. With it being a dual fan card, it would be considered a relatively compact card these days with a length of 245 mm or just over 9 and a half inches long. It does stick out on the top with the top of the fan shroud sitting at 23mm over the top of the PCI bracket and they did a good job of keeping it all in a dual-slot package.

For the dual fans the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC has what ASRock is calling their Striped Axial Fan which has a polished surface on the back and a textured finish on the front of the fan blades. Each of the 11 blades has three raised lines on them as well. Which is where the striped in the fan name comes from. They do spin down and turn completely off under light workloads as well. One fan has the ASRock branding and the other had the Challender branding on the center cap and both fans are translucent so we can see through them and see the heatsink below. It also gives an even better look at how the blow-through design on the right fan works including a heatpipe that is visible behind the fan. The fan openings are 100mm but there is a hair more than 2mm on each side between it and the fan making the blades themselves 95mm.  

Up on the top edge of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, a few things are going on. The fan shroud wraps around here with both the ASRock branding and Radeon branding printed in silver, one on each end. The ASRock branding also has a light diffuser just below it for the RGB lighting behind it. Also on top is the power connection and the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC uses a single 8-pin PCIe power connection. It sits at the end of the PCB putting it at about the 2/3 mark on the card itself and because the fan shroud sticks up higher this is at the PCB level and is recessed down into the card meaning all of the extra height of the card is using what would have been dead space.

Looking around at the top, bottom, and end edges of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC gives us a better look at how the cooling is set up. For starters, the aluminum heatsink is set up in a horizontal configuration which in my experience will run warmer, but we will test that later. That means that all of the air being pushed down into the card from the fans runs the length of the card except for the blow-through part near the end. The heatsink fins don’t go any higher than the top of the PCB but you do have heatpipes running on both the top and bottom which are pulling heat from on top of the GPU out and across the heatsink. At the end of the card, the fan shroud does still wrap around but the other half is open and we can see the exit for the heatsink here.

For display connections, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC has just three connections in total, one less than we traditionally see. You get two DisplayPort connections and one HDMI with each having a label stamped into the PCI bracket. The PCI bracket is unfinished which stands out with the otherwise black card. It does have some ventilation cut out of it, but the vents are all very thin slots so there won’t be much blowing through here. The card design does push air in this direction which makes me wonder why there aren’t larger vents here and why we can see that the fan shroud drops down and blocks these vents even if they were more open.

The back of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC does have a full-length metal backplate attached to it. This serves a few different purposes. The biggest one is that it helps give the card more strength to keep the PCB from sagging or flexing in the future. Beyond that, it does help protect the back of the PCB from physical damage. Lastly, because the card is longer than the PCB, it helps give the heatsink and the fan shroud structure at the end of the card. To help get some of that strength, on the PCB end of the card, the backplate wraps around the top with a small edge. The backplate itself is steel with a textured black finish on it. They use that textured finish in combination with glossy black paint to paint a design on the back of the card, similar to the design of the front fan shroud. That design has the ASRock branding in it and then they use silver to include the AMD Radeon branding and the Challenger model name as well, all of that branding is flipped upside down to make it readable when installed in most cases. The backplate does have a lot of cutouts in it, some for airflow like at the top of the card with six different cutouts as well as the two larger cutouts at the end of the card for the blow-through design. There is also a cutout area at the top of the card that gives access to the power plug and next to that, there is a small switch on the top edge of the PCB that lets you turn the RGB lighting on and off. The backplate also has a small sticker in the bottom corner near the PCI bracket, that has the model information as well as the serial number for the card on it.

Before getting into testing I did also get a picture of the lighting on the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC and ASRock has kept it very simple. You get a single diffused light bar on the top edge of the card above the left fan. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more lighting touches on other parts of the card. But I was happy to see that they didn’t add any backlit branding.

 

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Live Pricing

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero – Live Pricing

Cooling: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H2 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (2x16GB) 6000MT/s CL28-36-36-96 – Live Pricing

Storage: Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB – Live Pricing

Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

 

 

Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. With the RX 9060 XT being a new GPU, I’m not comparing the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC with any other 9060 XT but I do want to focus on how it compares to the RX 7600 XT and RX 7600 from AMDs last generation of cards and the 6750 XT from the generation before that, Nvidia’s new RTX 5060 Ti that I recently tested, and other Nvidia cards in that same range like the RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3070, etc. Sadly I don’t have the RTX 5060 in to compare just yet, but hopefully soon.

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC scored a 38923 in the base Fire Strike test putting it right with the RX 6750 XT, below the RTX 4070, and ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti. In Fire Strike Extreme it scored 18501 and this time the RX 6740 XT edged out in front just slightly and the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was right with the RTX 3070 Ti. Then in Fire Strike Ultra, it scored a 9436 here it is at the top of a group of cards all at nearly the same score including the 3070 Ti and the 6750 XT but also this time the RTX 5060 Ti as well.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In the base Time Spy test the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC jumped up ahead of the 6750 XT and the 3070 Ti and was running just below the RTX 5060 Ti with a score of 16162. In Time Spy Extreme the result was similar but the 5060 Ti did pull ahead slightly putting the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC just below it and ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti with a score of 7384.

I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC dropped down the charts here. It scored a 2880 on Speed Way but that put it behind the RTX 3060 Ti and ahead of the RTX 4060, it was still noticeably ahead of the RX 6750 XT which shows the improvement AMD has made. For Port Royal, it’s a little farther up in the chart sitting ahead of the RX 7700 XT but below the RX 6800 XT and 2500 points ahead of the RX 6750 XT.

I also ran the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC scored a 3706 and is sitting just ahead of the RTX 5060 Ti and just a hair behind the RX 6800 XT.

Last up I also ran the 3DMark FSR 2 comparison tool on the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC. This doesn’t test the newer FSR 3 or the latest FSR 4 but it does still give us a look at the difference in performance just the detail settings can make. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC came in at 22.19 FPS without FSR 2 on at all, turning it on at the highest quality ran at 43.2 FPS, the balanced setting was 51.85 FSP and the performance setting took that up to 64.17 FPS. The most impressive though is the ultra performance setting which jumped up to 100.79 FPS.

 

In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 8 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of whether turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 is also tested with Super Sampling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). In total, each video card is tested 60 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors, and 240 helps show the performance ideal for the latest higher refresh displays.

So how did the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC do? At 1080p all of the results came in over 60 FPS with a majority of those being over 120 FPS as well. It has 4 over 240 FPS, 9 in the 120-239 FPS range, and 5 between 60 FPS and 119 FPS. At 1440p we see one result drop down below 60 FPS but still, everything else was over 60 FPS. There was just 1 over 240 FPS this time, 9 between 120 and 239 FPS, 7 between 60 and 119 FPS, and the one between 30 and 59 FPS. Even at 4k, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, with its 16GB of VRAM does still hold its own even though it isn’t designed for it at all. 11 results were over 60 FPS and the other 7 were between 30 FPS and 59 FPS. AMD has designed the RX 9060 XT to be able to handle the most demanding games at 1080p and it does that, but that also translates to good and sometimes passable capabilities at 1440p and 4k.

To get a better look at some of the cards that are the closest competition to the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC I have averaged out all of our results at each of the three resolutions tested. This gives us a more detailed look at the overall standings and the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC comes in below the RX 7700 XT and the RX 6750 XT. The RX 6750 XT is especially close in performance to the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC across the board, being just .7 of an FPS behind it at 4k for example.

Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below. The averages above already paint the picture of what you will see for the most part. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC comes in just below the RX 7700 and ahead of the RX 6750 XT consistently. There are a few games where it jumps out in front of the RTX 5060 Ti and other times where it is well below. But overall that is what you can expect.

Another new addition to my testing was a few additional tests using Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of only a few games that support most of the tech from all three of the GPU companies. So I did tests at medium and ultra detail while having Super Sampling on for all of the cards. Using whatever the latest and greatest is supported. In this case, I tested with FSR. Just a note here, the AMD cards only allowed FSR when running windowed mode whereas Nvidia only performed well in fullscreen mode. The big thing I wanted to see here is how FSR improved performance at ultra detail, especially at 4k. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC struggled at 4k ultra detail with just an average of 32 FPS, using FSR however it jumped up to 63 FPS, not only doubling the performance but also going from rough to playable. 1440p goes from 74 FPS up to 115 and at 1080p it went from 117 up to 191 FPS.

 

AI Benchmarks

Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases, people who game also do work on the side. AI performance importance has increased quickly recently as well. So it is also important to check out the compute and AI performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was Geekbench AI, a cross-platform AI benchmark that uses real-world machine learning tasks giving three results, a full precision score, half precision score, and quantized score. The scores are all stacked together to give us a good overall look and the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC did well here. In fact, it is sitting ahead of the RTX 3090 Ti and below the RX 7800 XT. The 7700 XT which it was just behind in a lot of other tests and the 6750 XT are both farther down in the chart.

 

 

Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.

For this, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and AIDA64. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC averaged 222.85 watts across the peak wattages on our tests. That put it in below the RTX 4070 and ahead of the RX 7600. It’s also a huge improvement over the RX 6750 XT which it has performed similarly with in a lot of tests. The 6750 XT averaged 110 more watts, that’s a huge improvement. The highest result for the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was 238.49 watts and overall all of the results are surprisingly close with just Time Spy Extreme and Speed Way being higher than the rest.

With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC did 31.61 points per watt putting it below the RTX 4070 and just ahead of the RX 7900 XTX on this efficiency ranking. The RX on the other hand is down at the bottom of the chart at just 17.7 points per watt.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC is in the top half of the chart for the 50% noise result at 40.8 dB. At 100% fan speed, however, it drops down to the bottom of the chart with 53.6 dB. This is interesting because the RPM chart shows us that the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was running closer to the middle of the pack in fan speed. Having just two fans does help, but I don’t know why it was noisier at 50% fan speed.

I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC didn’t do too bad at just 35.4 dB sitting in the bottom ¼ of the chart. The fan speed under load chart does help paint the picture of why, however, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was running at just 31% fan speed when under load.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC’s temperatures leveled off at 63c putting it right in the middle of the chart. The memory temperatures were in the middle of the pack as well at 70c. Cranking the fans up to 100% the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC dropped down to 54c making it a delta of 9c between the stock fan profile and 100% fan speed. The memory temps dropped similarly down to 56c. That delta is a little on the low side but also helps paint a bigger picture as the stock fan profile was only running at 31% fan speed. The horizontal heatsink layout did well with the stock profile but there is less headroom than you might see in some other coolers.

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, like most cards with a blow-through second fan, runs significantly cooler on the right fan side than on the left. There is some heat near the center of the left fan but overall the fan side is running very cool. Up on the top edge, we can see where all of that heat is being directed with the hot spot being the exposed PCB at the center of the card. Then on the back, we see some of the same temperature differential that we saw with the fan side but the metal backplate has absorbed some of the heat here, especially when you get closer to the center of the card behind the GPU where it gets up to 56c.

 

Overall and Final Verdict

With all of the testing done and out of the way we can finally step back and get a look at how the new RX 9060 XT and with that the ASRock RX 9060 XT Challenger OC performed. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC that AMD sent over is an overclocked card, so we do need to keep that in mind. But as far as performance goes the RX 9060 XT averaged 183 FPS at 1080p, 127 FPS at 1440p, and at 4k 67 FPS. Those numbers show us that the card can perform at all three resolutions if needed but we also know that at 4k only half of the results were over 60 FPS with some down as low as just over 30 FPS. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC handles anything thrown at it at 1080p with a lot of those being ready for high refresh displays. Gaming at 1440p is possible as well, but the most demanding games will still struggle a little. AMD made big improvements in both power usage and power efficiency when compared to the RX 7700 XT and the older RX 6750 XT which otherwise performed similarly to the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC. The only area where it didn’t excel were the tests with ray tracing, but even there they have made big strides, Nvidia is still ahead there though.

The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC itself has a nice relatively compact design. It is taller but they are utilizing space that would already be used with the power cable up on top and the dual fan design is a lot easier to fit in most builds compared to the triple fan cards and 3+ slot cards that you see with a lot of the higher end cards. I was concerned with the heatsink design being a horizontal layout, especially with the fan shroud blocking airflow that might go out the PCI bracket. But it didn’t perform badly in our tests, it just didn’t have much headroom left over. Its noise performance was great when under load and good at 100% fan speed but struggled some at 50% fan speed for some reason. The card design as a whole was a little too aggressive for me with a lot going on with the fan shrouds design.

The RX 9060 Ti is available in 8GB and 16GB variants and with that, it has two different prices. I do think that I would prefer to see two different model names for cards like this that have two different memory capacities. That isn’t AMD specific at all, they have both done it multiple times through the years. But there are areas where that memory capacity will change the card's performance, namely at 4k and 1440p sometimes. For the 1080p market which AMD is targeting that will be less of an issue, however. The 8GB RX 9060 Ti has an MSRP of $299 and the 16GB model we have here is $349. The graph above puts together Time Spy Extreme performance along with both MSRP and current card pricing for the cheapest card of that specific GPU. Given today's market, we can’t just go by MSRP.  With the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, we don’t know what the market price will eventually be so we can only go by its MSRP. That said its performance even when looking at MSRPs puts it only behind the RX 9070 and at the top of the chart with current prices. A lot of people will see how the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC performed similarly to the RX 6750 XT and the RX 7700 XT and wonder why you wouldn’t get one of those and that might be the case when looking at used cards. But both of those cards are way down the chart here because of their current market prices. At the end of the day, if you are looking to game at 1080p the RX 9060 XT is a great option. Especially if you can get it at or near its listed MSRP. We will have to see tomorrow how that goes with the pricing of overclocked and aftermarket cards often coming in a lot higher.

Live Pricing: HERE